Wednesday, June 11, 2014

World Building with Cherie Reich

I'm hosting Cherie Reich today as part of her blog tour for her debut novel Reborn. Cherie is here to talk about world building, something that I admit intimidates me as an author. I really admire those who take it on and as I know Cherie is excellent at it I'm excited to share her advice.

Also, as part of her tour, Cherie and the rest of the Untethered Realms authors (including me) are giving away more than $50 worth of books to one giveaway winner. Be sure to enter to win through the Rafflecopter below!

Take it away, Cherie!

Five
Ways to Improve Your World-Building

1. Take notes. Remembering the world you created is half the battle.

2. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is your story’s world. You
don’t have to know your world up front. First drafts should focus more on the
characters and plot. As you delve into rewrites and edits, this is where the
world-building should start to shine.

3. You may be God, but you also must make sense. We writers are like
gods. We create worlds filled with interesting people and animals, but unlike
real life, our worlds must make sense. If you go against the rules in your
world, then you must have a very good reason—and rationality—to do so.

4. Be an anthropologist. Anthropology is divided into subsets:
sociocultural, biological, archaeological, and linguistic. It is up to the
writer to be the expert in all those anthropological fields when it comes to
your world-building. Think about what we have in our own world and see how you
can use it and change it to fit the world you are creating.

5. Be a geographer. Learning a little bit about the land your
characters live on will help you. Look at maps. Learn about climate. Knowing a
little will help you enrich your world.

Do you have any world-building tips?

To save a kingdom, a
prophetess must challenge Fate.

On the day of Yssa’s death
and rebirth, the god Apenth chose her as the Phoenix Prophetess.

Sea serpents and gods
endanger the young prophetess’s journey and sour the omens. Yssa is cursed
instead of blessed, and her duties at the Temple of Apenth prove it. She spends
her days reading dusty scrolls, which does nothing to help her forget Tym, the
boy back home. But the annoying yet gorgeous ferryman’s son Liam proves to be a
distraction she can’t predict, even though he rarely leaves her alone for two
sand grains.

Her boring temple life
screeches to a halt when visions of her parents’ murders consume her. Yssa
races across an ocean to stop the future. If she can’t change Fate, she’ll
refuse to be the Phoenix Prophetess any longer. Fate, however, has other plans
for her and the kingdom.

A self-proclaimed bookworm, Cherie
Reich is a speculative fiction writer and library assistant living in Virginia.
Her short stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies, and her books
include the horror collection Nightmare, a space fantasy novella
collection titled Gravity, and the fantasy series The Foxwick
Chronicles and The Fate Challenges. Reborn is her debut
novel. She is Vice President of Valley Writers and a member of the Virginia
Writers Club and Untethered Realms. For more information, please visit her website.

Excellent to see that Cherie's book blog tour has reached your wonderful site.

I shall take notes about your points. All five of them. Of course, when I don't have pen and paper, I end up babbling my inspirational words into the recording device on my mobile or cell phone. Imagine the weird looks of people walking by me.

Thanks for the tips, too. Number one would have to be an absolute necessity for me. Heck, I have to write myself notes just to keep track of the REAL world, so I can only imagine how difficult it would be to keep track of an imaginary one.

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About Me

Paranormal fiction author of the novels Polar Night, Polar Day, & The Ghosts of Aquinnah and the novella The Turnagain Arm. When not writing fiction, I love to write about animals and animal-related issues.

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Favorite Quotes

A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step ~ Lao Tzu

Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be. ~ Shel Silverstein

I believe that the most important single thing, beyond discipline and creativity, is daring to dare. ~ Maya Angelou

If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced ~ Vincent Van Gogh

What people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can ~ Henry David Thoreau

Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is never too late to be what you might have been ~ George Eliot

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms ~ George Eliot